Make: Live 06 – Bikes, Basics to Extremes Wednesday April 13th, 9pm ET/6pm PT
Watch at makezine.com/live or on UStream Please join us in the UStream chat or mark tweets with #makelive to interact live with the show.

The countdown to our sixth annual Maker Faire Bay Area has begun! This year’s Faire, the world’s largest DIY festival, is taking place on May 21 and 22 at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds south of San Francisco. Mark your calendars, if you haven’t already (and pick up tickets at a discount). At the core of every Maker Faire are the amazing makers who bring their projects and enthusiasm to share. This is the first in a series of interviews profiling some of these inspirational folks. Today we chat with Sam D’Amico of the Stanford Solar Car Project. A rendering of the car their team is working on, named Xenith, is shown above.

Before we get started with the interview, here are the team’s predicted specs for Xenith:
5 meters long, 1.5 meters wide
150V battery pack
1300W SunPower solar array
Mass: 150kg-180kg (we will know once the car is assembled completely)
Estimated maximum speed: 80-90 miles per hour
Estimated solar cruise speed: 50-60 miles per hour
Range without sunlight: several hundred miles

1. What is the Stanford Solar Car Project. When was it started and what is the goal? The Stanford Solar Car Project is an undergraduate student group at Stanford University dedicated to designing, building, and racing solar-powered electric vehicles in transcontinental competitions. We were founded in 1989 and are currently building our 10th car, which hopefully will be our fastest yet. Our ultimate goal is to win the World Solar Challenge, a 3,000km race from Darwin to Adelaide across the Australian Outback.

2. Tell us about the project you’re bringing to Maker Faire. What inspired your team to make it and how long did it take? Our tenth car, Xenith is our most aerodynamically advanced car yet. Along with advanced carbon fiber construction, custom electronics, and the next-generation silicon solar array, we’re hoping to be extremely competitive against other student teams such as MIT, Michigan,, and previous winners Tokai University. The car seats one and drives much like a normal car, with a steering wheel, brake, and accelerator pedals.

3. How many people have worked on Xenith? What does your collaboration process look like? Our team ranges from 15 to 30 people, depending on the time in the school year and the amount of work needed to be done on the car. We approximately divide the team by discipline, but what ends up happening is that people end up working on whatever requires the most manpower at a given time. As an electrical engineering major, I end up doing tasks including electronics design/assembly, software, finance, and even bodywork. We end up having several core members that are well versed on all systems critical to the car, and then a number of people who serve as the point people for specific projects.

Xenith, the Stanford Solar Car Project's car for 2011, before the paint job.

4. How did you hear about Maker Faire and why did you decide to participate? We heard about the Maker Faire since many of us are MAKE subscribers and a couple of us went to the event last year. Since we have a new car, we figured this year was a great opportunity to get more exposure and help promote electric vehicles and clean technology in the process. We would also love to get the Bay Area community aware of our program and promote practical science and engineering education.

5. Is the project strictly a hobby or a budding business? We’re a non-profit student group at Stanford University comprised entirely of unpaid volunteers. Several companies, however, have spun off our team in recent memory, most notably Tesla Motors.

6. What new idea (in or outside of your field) has excited you most recently? We’re currently the most excited about our next-generation solar panel technology. We have come up with a technology that is light, smooth, and lets as much light in as possible. In some sense, the technology resembles how modern flat panel displays and phone screens are put together, laminated with a thin sheet of high-strength glass. In this case, we’re looking at potential aerospace applications for the technology due to its relative ease of assembly. The panels will go on the top of the car (as seen in the picture, and are wired to power converters that increase the voltage to be able to charge the battery pack.

7. If your team had a motto, what would it be? In terms of a motto, we don’t really have one decided for this car yet. Probably something about it being really thin.

8. What advice would you give to the young makers out there just getting started? Many of us came from a background of experimenting in our homes, taking risks, and voraciously searching for the next great project to try. Going the step from reading about great things to do to actually doing them is perhaps the best way to get started. The next most important factor is to maximize the resources that you have at your disposal, whether they be your parents, friends, or teachers, if you think that your horizons are limited by a lack of tools or technical experience. Also, it’s important to challenge the culture of risk-adverseness — as you will never be amazing at what you do unless you push the boundaries a little too much (and maybe risk your eyebrows getting singed a bit). Your parents will forgive you once you impress the admissions boards of various engineering schools with your practical skills.

Thanks so much, Sam! For more information, check out the team’s blog, which includes a lot of technical documentation. In true maker fashion, Sam said: ” Unlike most other teams we are not particularly secretive. While we hope to win the race, we don’t think we will push technology forward if we act as secretly as a Formula 1 team.” Awesome.

This is my portrait of Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera. He was the 32nd inventor in my project. I shot him in October at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, just a couple weeks before President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Technology.

Wood is the theme for this month’s Open MAKE/Young Makers program at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Four featured makers will be interviewed by MAKE’s Dale Dougherty in the McBean Theater, between 1pm and 2pm, and they’ll be talking about their work and process, and taking questions from the audience. Makers include:

Scott Weaver will talk about his passion for working with toothpicks, and what drove him to spend 35 years on a single massive project.

Bernie Lubell has installed a wooden collaborative machine in the Tinkering Studio that will allow visitors to slowly whittle a dowel down to a single toothpick, which will then be added to Scott’s piece.

Jess Hobbs will talk about the massive wooden structures that she installs on the playa at Burning Man.

And finally, Saul Griffith will bring these four months of Materiality to an end, by talking about his elephants that he built in each of our four highlighted materials: plastic, cardboard, metal, and wood.

Between 10am and 2pm, other Bay Area makers and Tinkering Studio staff will be sharing build activities with the public, including making a personalized laser-cut lantern, learning proper nail-driving with Tinkerer in Residence Gever Tulley, learn other basic woodworking skills, how to build a fire without matches, and Renga Arts will be showcasing some of their wooden music boxes. Plus much more!

6,000 builders armed with half a million bricks built a Lego tower nine inches higher than a Chilean tower built last fall, topping off at 102 feet, 3 inches.

What they don’t tell you is that there’s a metal pole down the middle — visible toward the end of the video — which takes some of the challenge out of the project: there’s no chance of collapse. In fairness to the Brazilian effort, however, the previous record holders (like the 2008 tower in Vienna, a tower built in 2010 in Munich, and a 100′ 10″ tower in Legoland Günzberg, built in 2010) did as well. Lego simply doesn’t have the strength to stack that high. Even if the tower hadn’t won the record, the organizers deserve credit for wrangling 500,000 bricks and thousands of schoolkids.

Thanks to our commenters for pointing out that, contrary to my implication in Monday’s bolt-action spud gun post, Jeremy Cook—cool though his project certainly is—is not the first person to build a breech-loading potato cannon. Not by a long shot. (Heh, sorry.)

Take, for instance, the SP9004, here, which is attributed to one Ed Goldmann, and is now, I believe, owned by Spudgun Technology Center proprietor Jeremy Hanson, of Minnesota, who writes:

Pure oxygen and propane fueled, laser sighted, bolt action, electrically controlled….This is one awesome piece of launching ordinance! It shoots spuds quite fast and is VERY cool looking. It is so cool looking Ed sent a picture to the feds (ATF) along with a letter querying the SP9004′s legality with the understanding it is for recreational launching of potato slugs only.

Are you the innovative type? A cook who marches to a different drummer? If you are interested in the science behind what happens to food while it’s cooking, then Cooking for Geeks from the Maker Shed just might be your kind of cookbook. Author Jeff Potter has done the cubicle thing, the startup thing, and the entrepreneur thing, and through it all maintained his sanity by cooking for friends. 432 pages.

Features:

Initialize your kitchen and calibrate your tools

Learn about the important reactions in cooking, such as protein denaturation, Maillard reactions, and caramelization, and how they impact the foods we cook

Konstruct is an investigation into Generative Art in an Augmented Reality environment. It is a sound reactive AR experience for the iPhone that allows the user to create a virtual sculpture by speaking, whistling or blowing into the device’s microphone. A variety of 3D shapes, colour palettes and settings can be combined to build an endless collection of structures. Compositions can be saved to the device’s image gallery.